The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  Ever since her first month in the special program in Prague, Elena had known what she was looking for. Yet he was an abstraction, this ideal man. Nearly everyone she met, with money and power, with wild ambition, was healthy in a way that made him irrelevant to her and to her mission. Jean-Yves was her first mistake. He was not egotistical. He was not a liar. His friends were not closeted homosexuals or secret gamblers.

  This man on the podium was something else. This man burned with spirit. Yet he also, very clearly, felt he was not good enough. Elena tried to imagine how many times he looked at himself in the mirror in the course of a day. She knew how to speak to a man like this.

  You flatter him.

  His speech went on for nearly an hour. He complained about the building some more, about New York’s roads and sewers, about the poor state of first-class airline travel, about Germany and its cheating ways, about the Japanese who were also figuring us out and cleaning our clocks, all our former enemies making fools of us, and then—finally—six exceptionally tall women in white satin dresses lifted the sheets off three cars.

  Craig led the applause. “Yes!” he said, about his own creations. “America has luxury again.”

  He invited his audience to touch the cars, to sit in them, while another group of women in matching white dresses distributed new brochures, each with a photo of Anthony Craig on the front.

  Dinner was served and a band started to play.

  Danika refilled her own flute of champagne, her fourth or fifth already. She was dating the senior assistant to John J. Marchi, a New York State senator. His name was Carlos. His family had practically been royalty in Cuba until Fidel Castro had stolen everything and kicked them out. Now Carlos was angry but in a different way than Anthony Craig appeared to be, and Elena suspected he mistreated Danika.

  “What did you think of that speech?”

  Danika looked down at the program. “It was only supposed to last ten minutes. I’m starving.” She looked around to be sure none of the other models could hear. “What a dingdong. No wonder he had to pay us to come.”

  They were seated far from the front, far from Anthony Craig, and it would be a long time before they were served their first course. Elena excused herself from the table, to go to the restroom, and she took the long way—past his table.

  Anthony Craig was standing up and speaking to Mayor Beame, a tiny man with gray hair and dark eyebrows. When people talked about the mayor, they always said the same thing: he has the hardest job in the world.

  She eased close enough to hear their conversation, pretending she was looking for someone at the adjacent table.

  “It was theater, Abe. You of all people understand theater.”

  “But I’m sitting at your table. Everyone can see that. We’ve been exceptionally good to you…”

  “And my business spends an exceptional amount in this fucked-up city of thieves and murderers. You need to clean it up, Mayor Beame.”

  The mayor shook his head and laughed. His wife, clearly uncomfortable, pulled gently at his arm. She was carrying her jacket and her purse.

  “You might spend a lot, Anthony, but you sure do ask for a pretty penny from city hall. I mean, for a free enterprise guy…”

  Elena chose this moment to walk slowly past the table, close enough to brush Anthony Craig’s arm. He was already looking away from the mayor, as though he had lost interest. The mayor was not going to get the apology he wanted, and Mrs. Beame knew it.

  As their arms touched, Anthony Craig reached for her. She pretended not to notice at first, even when his hand was on her shoulder.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said. “What do you think of the cars?”

  “Lovely. Congratulations.”

  “Oh my God, I love that accent. Don’t you think you’d look good in one?”

  “I suppose so, Mr. Craig.” Elena didn’t stop walking or turn around.

  He called after her, something else about her accent and “that eastern look.” Elena pretended not to hear, and made her way back to her table as the salad course was being served. She was about to sit when a young man in a black suit stopped in front of her.

  “Mr. Craig wants to know what you’re drinking,” he said, a little breathlessly.

  Elena gestured at the bottle of champagne on their table.

  “He’ll send you another one.”

  She smiled and looked down. “If he insists.”

  The young man pulled a small notebook out of his pocket, and a pen. “What’s your name?”

  Danika and the others at the table were listening.

  “Why would he want to know that?” said Elena.

  “Mr. Craig likes to keep track of his guests, that’s all.” The man lowered his voice. “VIPs like yourself.”

  Elena told the young man her name, guiding him through the spelling of it. When he asked if she was a New Yorker or a tourist, she told him the truth: she was here to promote American tourism to Montreal as the 1976 Olympics approached. There was an event at the Plaza the next day.

  “You’re staying at the Plaza?” said the young man.

  Elena nodded.

  “Sorry, it’s my job to do stuff like this. Thanks, Miss…Klimentová.”

  Elena and Danika stayed for the salad and soup courses. When the new bottle of champagne arrived, Elena poured it for her tablemates. Danika drank three glasses, then accompanied her back to the Plaza.

  In her room they ordered a pot of mint tea. Danika poured vodka in her cup, from a flask she kept in her purse, and finally told Elena about Carlos, how he fell into rages.

  “Let’s contact Sergei, tell him.”

  “Sergei was here last month. I told him.”

  “And…?”

  “And nothing, Elenka. Carlos is going to run for the Third Congressional District in the next election. The crazier he is, the better. You know that. If it comes with a bit of violence, all the better.” She sat up straight, feigned perfect sobriety, and impersonated Sergei. “We want him and we need him.”

  “I’ll visit your Carlos tonight with a baton. Then he’ll think twice about hurting you. Where is the bastard?”

  “Washington.” Danika poured a bit more vodka into her mug.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Danika blew into her tea and vodka. “I suspect we will spend our lives apologizing to one another.”

  There was a knock on the door. Elena looked through the peephole to see a porter carrying something enormous. She opened the door and he entered with a basket of fruit and chocolate and nuts. Both women laughed at the size of it. Danika gave him a dollar while Elena opened the card.

  Dear Elena,

  Tonight was a great night. The cars were a hit. They are going to sell like crazy. My only regret was that I couldn’t get to know you better. I hope to rectafy that.

  Yours, Anthony

  She showed the card to Danika.

  “Sergei will love this one,” said Elena. “He even misspelled ‘rectify.’ ”

  “You’re a very lucky girl.”

  Danika laughed, but Elena thought for the first time since entering the program that she might be.

  19

  STRASBOURG, 2016

  Grace begged her taxi driver to pull over in a village called Lingolsheim, on the way to the Strasbourg airport. Her face was hot and she was faint and dizzy. If she did not get out of the car, immediately, she would either pass out or throw up. In a mess of ferns and evergreens between two tidy whitewashed houses, she suspected the men following her had found a way to poison her.

  “Madame?” The driver called through his open window. “Should I take you to the hospital?”

  It felt somewhat better to be bent over, her hands on her knees, with the scent of wet fern. No, they hadn’t poisoned her. She was feeling exactly the way they wanted her to feel. A lovely woman and her father had burned to death and it was her fault. She retched.

  “Maybe I will go.” The driver stepped out of the car, opened the back d
oor, and began to lift her bag out.

  “No, wait,” said Grace. “I’m fine.” While she was not fine, seeing a strange man hold her bag with her phone and notebook inside inspired a jolt of adrenaline. She ran toward him and shouted at him to put the bag down. The driver dropped it and backed into his Citroën with his hands up.

  At the airport she paid the driver and looked at herself in his rear-view mirror. Her hair was wild, and there was a sheen of sweat on her forehead. She wiped it away with a tissue and, from the back seat, scanned the area behind her for her pursuers. What had Jean-Yves de Moulin said about men like these? They lived without the capacity for empathy.

  In the security lineup she looked in every direction. Even now, knowing what she knew, there was no way to report the men to the police. There were no immediate flights back to Prague so she settled into a ninety-minute wait in the airport bar with her back to the wall. She had abandoned her carrots and blueberries in the hotel room, and while she was not hungry she knew she had to eat. She ordered an oniony tarte flambée and a water instead of another glass of white wine.

  She thought of William. Would he also die in an accident? How about her mother, or Jason and his family, Manon, Steadman Coe? She had spoken to them too. Grace was staring at the tarte flambée when a woman she recognized—from where?—walked through the bar with a giant smile.

  “Oh my God. Grace?” The woman wore plenty of makeup and seemed dressed for a cocktail party instead of a flight, with a red tight-fitting dress. She carried a glass of white wine in one hand and a little red Yves Saint Laurent handbag in the other. “Grace Elliott?”

  The moment she heard the woman say her name she remembered. “Tanya?”

  “What are the chances?” Tanya gestured at the chair across from Grace. “Are you…”

  “Alone, yes. Please, join me. Wow, it’s great to see you.”

  While great wasn’t honest, Grace did welcome the comfort of distraction. Tanya Bischoff had been one of the top students in their graduate program, a master’s degree in journalism, where the grades didn’t matter. Success was networking: building a national or global team of people who could potentially hire you. When last she saw Tanya it was at the fifteenth anniversary of their graduating class at the Hilton in Galveston, Texas. Fewer than twenty of them showed up and only nine people were still in journalism. Grace had gone because she had been such a bad networker when she was in her twenties. Now that she had confidence and lacked shame, she could ask anyone for just about anything. The only problem was that no one could possibly help her do what she really wanted, which was to leave the Flash.

  Had she even spoken to Tanya in Galveston?

  “What are you doing in Strasbourg?” said Tanya. “Holiday?”

  “Just a bit of work.”

  “Does the Flash have overseas bureaus?” Tanya did not do a great job of hiding that she found this comical. “What are you working on?”

  “It’s too boring to tell.” Grace looked over Tanya’s shoulder, to be sure her pursuers had not arrived. “What about you?”

  “I had to cover the signing of a trade agreement today.” Tanya yawned. “But I’m off to Paris, and then to New York and Washington to cover the election. Hey.” Tanya pointed. “We’re growing. You’re not looking for a more typical reporting job are you, a senior correspondent job somewhere?”

  “Who do you work for, Tanya?”

  “RT.”

  Grace did her best job of hiding her reaction by stabbing her tarte flambée with a plastic fork. “That’s Russia Today, right?”

  “That’s the old name. It’s like the BBC, only from a different country. We broadcast in English, French, Spanish. Even Arabic, if that’s your thing.” Tanya leaned over the table. She had freckles on her nose and under her eyes, and a hint of them peeked through her makeup. Grace felt the panic from the back seat of the taxi creeping back into her chest and she beat it back, faking a smile, as Tanya talked about her employer. While she had never seen a broadcast or clicked a link, she had first heard about RT from taxi drivers in Montreal, who tended to blame every bit of woe and suffering in the world, including their own, on American malevolence and aggression.

  “I don’t understand,” Grace said. “Every news organization in the world is shrinking. Except yours?”

  “Our only shareholder is an enterprising government, and they understand our value.”

  “And what is it?”

  “The truth, of course.”

  “And you have hiring authority at RT? You can make me a job offer at a bar in a tiny airport in Eastern France?”

  Tanya shrugged. “They like me. They want more of me.”

  “I’m forty-three years old. Isn’t that too old to be on-air?”

  “And I’m forty-four. They’re very ambitious. Very aggressive.”

  Grace looked around the airport bar again, this time without any worry about seeming impolite. “Very aggressive. So what did they tell you about me?”

  “Pardon?”

  Grace watched her classmate’s face.

  “If you’re going to bribe someone, it has to be slightly better than this.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. We’re expanding. You’re a good journalist.”

  “How do you know?”

  Tanya placed her hands on the zinc table and pushed her chair back. She stood up and finished her glass of wine in one gulp. “If I knew you were going to be hostile…”

  “They’re murderers, Tanya.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She would not look at Grace. “I was just trying to help an old friend.”

  “We were never friends.”

  Tanya smiled again. Her teeth were even whiter than Violet Rain’s. “You’re no better than me, Grace. Don’t even pretend to be.”

  “I guess I should be thankful you didn’t just walk up and stab me.”

  Tanya placed a hand on her purse. “I don’t know what you’re caught up in, Grace, but…” And she left, weaving through the tables and down the corridor in her red cocktail dress.

  * * *

  —

  Grace only managed a few bites of her tarte flambée. She wanted to call her mother, Manon, or even Jason again. Instead she pulled out her computer, connected to airport wifi, and searched for anything to do with spies, sex, the StB, the KGB, kingfisher, and defection. She found a Washington Post article by Michael Dobbs from 1987 with the word “Sexpionage” in the headline.

  The list of known KGB entrapment victims since World War II is long, distinguished and remarkably varied. It includes men and women, bachelors and married couples, young and old, homosexuals and heterosexuals, military attaches and journalists, security guards and ambassadors. No category of western resident in Moscow, it seems, has been immune from the charms of Soviet “swallows” and “ravens,” KGB jargon for professional seductresses and their male counterparts.

  Grace wrote “professional seductresses” and “swallows” in her notebook, and read about a number of prominent men who had been lured into compromising relationships with beautiful and intelligent women. She wrote down a quotation from an author who had studied the KGB and had published standard books on the subject, John Barron.

  What people fail to realize is that operations like these involve much more than simply a boy-girl relationship. It’s not a situation in which the lone westerner is confronted by the lone Russian temptress. In reality, it’s one isolated individual against a massive, very experienced apparatus. All the circumstances are controlled by the KGB to maneuver the victim to a desired end. Sexual enticement, and the lure of a fulfilling relationship, is just a first step across the threshold. But once it is taken, retreat can be very difficult.

  20

  PRAGUE, 2016

  Her pursuers were not on the flight to Prague. Now that Grace knew who they were and what they were capable of, she doubted they bothered to fly commercial.

  When she landed she looked up the address
of the FBI’s office in Prague, which was housed in the American embassy in Malá Strana. It was late evening, but she could not imagine it had opening hours. Her Uber driver spoke no English. Grace was alone in the back seat of a Volkswagen, bombed with air freshener, and her fears. If they could break into her hotel rooms, and find her at a restaurant at a little airport in Strasbourg, these men without empathy could find her mother in Florida.

  The American embassy was a beige stone building in a well-lighted cobblestone plaza. Soft lamps shone in upper-floor windows and three luxury cars were parked opposite: a silver BMW and two large black Craig sedans. No one stood in front of the building keeping guard, though two men in black watched from the shadows across the street. She was pleased to see them.

  Grace pressed the call button outside the door.

  “I’m a journalist,” she said, when a man’s voice asked if he could help her. “I’ve been threatened.”

  “American?”

  “Yes. Threatened by killers.”

  Ten seconds later the door opened. A handsome black man in an armed forces uniform stood in an enclosed chamber. She repeated she was a journalist, working on a politically sensitive story, and that she had been harassed and violated by foreign agents who had murdered two Czech citizens.

  “Slow down. Agents?” He opened a small notebook and prepared to write. “How do you know they’re agents?”

  Grace drew a breath, aware that her voice was becoming shaky. “Sorry. Men.”

  “So not agents. Men are harassing you. Have you spoken to the police? And what’s this about a murder?”